Eggnog Pie and Glitter in Your Eye

 

I have never been much of an eggnog fan, but because I like creative baked goods to change up my breakfast routine, I was intrigued by references on social media to eggnog pie. I waited until Dear Husband acquired his annual half gallon of the stuff, and then when he realized it was going to expire faster than he could drink it, I discovered that this pudding pie is surprisingly easy to make:

1 1/2 cups of your favorite eggnog

1 cup of heavy cream or 2 cups of whipped topping

3.4oz package of INSTANT vanilla pudding

1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg

Graham cracker pie crust

Before

Mix the eggnog, pudding mix, and nutmeg together until thick (5 minutes).

Whip the cream if necessary (stiff peaks! turn the bowl upside down over your head!).

Then fold the latter into the former.

Pour into pie crust, make the top look pretty with your spatula, then chill for 3 hours. 

During

Here are some photos of our Christmas decorations. We compromised on a wreath and garland with two types of greenery and pine cones for contrast but no glitter or fake snow.

(Yet the light-up reindeer in the backyard DOES have glitter, and where it was unboxed in the garage still looks like a unicorn massacre scene.)

Dear Husband wants to extend the icicle lights across the front of the roofline, but we'll have to figure out how to plug everything in and THEN how to hold up the lights, as currently someone has to leave the house and go around the corner to un/plug the outside lights; there's another outdoor outlet on the other side of the house, but it's behind a bush. It may be easier to wrap a strand of lights around the light pole.

After

Serve with an extra dash of nutmeg and/or cinnamon! It's just the right consistency, creamy, with a little tang as an aftertaste. I have been pairing a slice with a dark tea (like Irish Breakfast or Cinnamon Rooibos) and a little fruit (clementines, grapes) for breakfast.

Carob Chip Cookies

Another weekend, another failed bid on a house, another baked good. What else is new? This Saturday we looked at a cute little house in Mount Washington. Then we picked up paninis from the local cafe to eat in a park while watching an adorable toddler playing with a stick. Next we walked through the neighborhood, enjoying the 74-degree sunshine and the vistas all along Grandview Avenue overlooking the Monongahela River, the Point, downtown Pittsburgh, and the Ohio River. We even got to experience a classic set of Pittsburgh steps (left); this is "Well Street." Below is the mural at the cafe of a stork delivering baskets of coffee beans from different countries.

In the late afternoon, I pulled up David Attenborough's A Life on This Planet while baking carob chip cookies. Funnily enough, just that morning I had read an article shared by a friend on Facebook about "how carob traumatized a generation" of children in the 1970s, when their parents jumped on the health-food bandwagon: "Poor carob ... [i]t never wanted to be chocolate in the first place." Dear Husband had purchased the imitation chips because he gets migraine headaches with even a little exposure to caffeine, so this was an experiment to let him enjoy a classic treat without suffering for it later. 

I decided to use the recipe on bag instead of the usual Toll House one. Interestingly, although it claimed to be "allergy friendly," it still called for milk and an egg. I substituted an equivalent amount of applesauce for the milk but left in the egg and used brown sugar instead of date sugar. After saving a couple spoonfuls of dough for DH so he could have the privilege of risking Salmonella poisoning, I chilled the dough balls on the cookie sheets for a few minutes in the freezer. Maybe I should have pulled the cookies out a few minutes sooner so the edges didn't get a crispy, but all in all, a passable substitute for chocolate chip cookies.

Polly Wanna Cracker?

In a previous post I explained that Dear Husband and I were trying DIY home redecorating, namely tissue-paper "stained-glass" window hangings. This is the second iteration.

Keeping with the "tropical island" theme, I free-handed a parrot.

I mean, it mostly looks like a pigeon, but what can you expect from a city girl?

Gluing the feathers on the pigeon-bodied parrot, surrounded by dappled jungle.

Ta da!

Annals of Bad Housekeeping: Bathroom Edition

1st Folio: Dear Husband and I adopted a cat from the humane society a month ago (introductory post with photos coming soon!). She spent most of her first week hiding in our semi-finished basement, either behind some boxes or up in the rafters. One of the first clues that she had ventured to the first floor of the house was these dirty paw prints on the 1/2-bath sink, presumably leading to the fragrant bar of lavender soap. I thought our furry friends were supposed to leave paw prints on our hearts, not our porcelain fixtures.

2nd Folio: The upstairs bathtub faucet has dripped since we moved in two years ago. We immediately asked the landlord to send a plumber, who pronounced the situation hopeless, since the pipes are encased in the wall. About a month ago I decided to try to measure how much water was coming out of the faucet: about 2 gallons per day! I have tried to capture the water and re-use it around the house: in the Brita filter, for washing produce, and especially for watering the plants. Unfortunately, the aloe plant took offense to suddenly living in a tropical jungle rather than in an arid desert of benign neglect and promptly rotted at the stem.

What Residency Looks Like VIII: Working at Home

Residents are now required to log their "duty hours" of clinical responsibilities, but we all spend hours of unclocked time each week answering emails, preparing presentations, and studying. Sometimes residency looks like completing a required module on acid-base disturbances from the comfort of my rocking chair while enjoying the sunny view of the green and gold gingko trees on our block.

Older

Newer

Home Sweet Home

Pittsburgh is the city of three rivers: the Monongahela, the Allegheny, and the one nobody can remember (the Ohio). We came up from the south, crossed the Monongahela, and then drove along it for a beautiful vista of our new home. On account of the triangular downtown and numerous hills, few streets here make a grid, some are marked "private," and some are actually public staircases. One of my colleagues says the city must have been designed by an angry civil engineer, because it makes so little sense. Case in point: a ridiculous number of 5-way intersections. Driving here is often improvised and not for the faint of heart. The city still feels like an experiment and not like "home" yet.

Dear Husband says the housing stock reminds him of Baltimore in the way that one block can be quite nice and the next block a row of trashy lots and boarded up houses. Only in The Burgh the third block could look positively semi-rural, with trees, brush, and an insurmountable hillside behind it. For instance, the friend of a friend's house where we stayed when we first arrived is perched on a hill with bee hives in the side "yard." (How cool is that?)

Rowhouses: not just in Baltimore.

DH and I are renting a townhouse in an eastern neighborhood called Point Breeze. (Pittsburghers take their neighborhoods so seriously that they are listed on every major street sign, and there are multiple, detailed Wikipedia articles about them.) There are three schools within two blocks, as well as the Reformed Presbyterian Seminary (estb. 1810) and The Frick Art & Historical Center nearby. We are within walking distance of one edge of the 644-acre Frick Park.

Speaking of trashy neighbors, while outdoor maintenance is our responsibility for the duration of our lease, it was apparently not the responsibility of the landlord before we moved in. The cantankerous old man who lives next door actually accosted DH the day we moved in about cutting the knee-high grass in the front yard, as if that were our fault. As it is, DH's father, uncle, and cousin clipped the yard. Later my mother and I weeded the front garden bed and bought a couple hosta plants to fill in. The back bed, as you will see, is hopeless for the little time I have (here).

This is Dear Husband's view from the piano bench out the picture window to

the front porch. The fireplace is to the left, the front door and couch to the right.

This two-story townhouse with semi-finished basement and storage space in the attic is technically a little bigger than our single-level slab in Champaign, but the layout is different, with only two bedrooms instead of three. Two sets of steps lead up the front to a porch, where we've secured our patio furniture. The front door opens into DH's music salon, complete with couch for house concerts (we're already planning a holiday carol-sing) and Nancy McAleer's watercolor painting of Baltimore's Mount Vernon over the decorative fireplace.

 

View up the stairs with the skylight waaaay above. It's noisy when it rains.

The staircase with its narrow clearance bisects the downstairs. The built-in shelves narrow the passage so between the two rooms that the appliance delivery guys had to hoist the refrigerator OVER the newel post and banister to get the thing into the kitchen. Behind the stairs are the dining room and kitchen. With some rearranging, we've been able to get most of our downstairs furniture into the two rooms, as well as most of our knickknacks. (The rest will stay in boxes for the next move, hopefully in a year.) DH is pleased we got a half bath downstairs, for when the upstairs one is occupied.

Big, beautiful new refrigerator. :-)

Electric stove. :-(

The kitchen is large, with more cabinet space than I know what to do with. Literally. The house in Champaign had exactly one drawer (we used it for the oven mitts next to the stove). Now I've had to leave some drawers empty, because I don't have anything to put in them! And then there's the unfolding pantry. Seems like a neat idea, until you realize the cubbyholes are all different sizes, and that you have to pull out both hinged doors to get to the big shelves for flour, sugar, and the like. So I've left half the glassware packed and used some of the cupboard space for boxed dry goods for easier access.

What the what??

Downstairs is a "wet basement" that is storing what used to be in our garage. Up the stairs (that wouldn't admit the full-sized box spring [not queen-sized, full!]), the front bedroom has become combination living room and study. We left DH's big old rocking recliner on the curb in Champaign because it was broken, and it's not certain that we could get a new up the stairs, so he's using my rocker. I am unlikely to watch much television this anyway. My desk is in the basement, so I am using his. The back bedroom has a really funky shape, with closets along one wall, a recess for the bureaus on the other, and a sleeping nook in the back. The friend of a friend who viewed the place for us told me she was jealous of all the closet space, which is rare in old Pittsburgh houses.

Finally, the back porch is for storing our bicycles, the charcoal grill, and items for freecyclers to pick up. Our view isn't that great, but two doors down the neighbors have a small garden, a big dog, and a little girl, so we like to go down there to unwind in the evening.

We inherited the wind chime and hanging pot from the previous owners.

The pot is soon to have a transplanted spider plant in it.

Mermaid, butterfly, and bird (I promised it's there).

What Medical School Looks Like XXVIII

Sometimes medical school looks like my and Dear Husband's collective knowledge weighing down the threshold to my study while the wood glue dries for the next 24 hours. That's 10 of the 11 Durant volumes, a Shakespeare anthology, and textbooks on genetics, anatomy, and physiology.

Older

Newer

Let's Go on a Book Tour!

I noticed the other day that there are books *all over* our house. So I decided to go on a little "book tour" with my camera. These are the books Dear Husband and I are currently reading.

On the sideboard:

Shifting Boundaries of Public Health (2008) is a collection of essays edited by Susan Gross Solomon, Lion Murard & Patrick Zylberman. I am particularly interested in doyen of public health history Dorothy Porter's chapter on "The Social Contract of Health."

Susanne Michl's Im Dienste des Volkskörpers. Deutsche und französische Ärzte im Ersten Weltkrieg (2007) continues the discussion about individual versus collective identity and responsibility for health.



On the living room coffee table:

In Medizin und Krieg. Deutschland 1914-1924 (2014), Wolfgang Eckart compiles a career's worth of secondary literature on medicine before, during, and after World War I. I've stalled in the first chapter.

The other one is a PreTest question book in Pediatrics. I have not been "reading" it as much as I maybe should be.



On my bureau:

I've actually already read Mary Fissell, Vernacular Bodies (2005) and Clio in the Clinic: History in Medical Practice (2004), edited by Jacalyn Duffin; click to read my book review on this blog. On my to-read list is Duffin's Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints and Healing the Modern World (2008).

On my bedside table:

A friend loaned me Far From The Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity (2012), Andrew Solomon's 700-page award-winning meditation on the joys but mostly the difficulties of raising children who are in some way different from their parents: gay, Deaf, multiply disabled.

For Christmas, my father found me a neat little book edited by Harold Elk Straubing, In Hospital and Camp: The Civil War through the Eyes of its Doctors and Nurses (1993), with letters from medical personnel on both sides of the conflict.

On Dear Husband's nightstand:

Also for Christmas, I gave DH a copy of William Goldman's "abridged" version of The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure (1973). We take turns reading it to each other before (sometimes while) falling asleep at night.

DH has also set himself the task of reading all 11 volumes of Will Durant and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization in 11 years. He's got 3 months to read the last 300 pages of Volume XI: The Age of Napoleon (1975).

We Get By With A Little Help From Our Friends

When Dear Husband and I purchased our house eight years ago, we knew we would have to replace the carpet before we sold it again. It came with a dated, bluish-gray diamond pattern in the front room and hallway, thin brown shag in the two corner bedrooms, and a thin, dirty blue carpet in the middle bedroom that had been the dog's room. We pulled up the blue carpet ourselves and installed a locking hardwood floor for my study and left the rest. This was just as well, because our dearly departed cat Erasmus had a bad habit of retching his orange-colored food (always on the carpet, never on the hard floor). Well, now that we're preparing to sell and move, we went ahead and got the carpet replaced in the front room, hallway, and master bedroom. The carpet place doesn't want to take the responsibility of moving a grand piano, so we had to leave the music room as is.

Very kind friends P.S., B.B., and R.W. helped us pack up and move all the "belongings" from the furniture: the china in the cabinet; the DVDs, VHS tapes, and records; the TV and lamps; the drawers out of the bureaus; and no fewer than 25 books from our bedroom (natch).

Although our realtor had recommended a variegated shag named "Snow Peak" that we thought looked like "wild rice mix" and my mother proclaimed "dirty snow," we opted for a soft, solid shag called "Tassel." It's the middle of three tans that the carpet shop owner dubbed "renting" (darkest), "selling," and "owning" (lightest). We love it--and the new pad underneath--and wish we could have done this sooner.

It hasn't been without its aggravations, however, as it took Dear Husband half an hour to fix the furniture after the subcontracted carpet layers had finished; they forgot to cut the vent in the bedroom (left); and we are still in negotiations with them about putting down the loose threshold from the hallway into the study.